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A new progressive Christian PAC was recently announced. From the announcement:

Christians, for a change!

Christians for a CHANGE!

It doesn't matter how you read that, we love it and applaud, with admiration, this newly established PAC that was launched on July 4, 2012.

Christians Tired of Being Misrepresented has been calling out high profile Religious Right Wing Christians since 2010. At almost 19,000 members at the time of this writing, we continue to grow as more and more people find the courage and outlets to proclaim that the Conservative Right Wing Christians do not speak for them.

The non-partisan Texan Freedom Network is acting locally to raise awareness of the religious right in Texas. A recent announcement was brought to our attention by a commenter's post on our Facebook page.

‎Because of redistricting, all 15 seats on the Texas State Board of Education [SBOE] will be up for grabs in the November 2012 elections. The results of those elections will determine whether the Religious Right’s corrosive influence over public education will weaken or grow as the board considers what the next generation of public school students in Texas will learn about sex education, social studies, science, and other subjects. We plan to publish candidate announcements for a seat on the SBOE on TFN Insider. We will publish announcements in no particular order, and their publication does not constitute any sort of endorsement by TFN. We will redact requests for contributions or mentions of fundraising events from the announcements, but we will provide links to the candidates’ websites (if available). ~Texas Freedom Network

It is no surprise to the Talk2Action community that the U.S. Christian Right did not fold up its tents and head home when the Uganda legislature failed to pass the 2009 "Kill the Gays" bill giving the death penalty for something called aggravated homosexuality. Instead, U.S. groups are expanding their presence in sub-Saharan Africa, as a new report, "Colonizing African Values," by Political Research Associates' Kapya Kaoma documents.

There has been explosive growth in several sectors of the radical right, especially in the last few years, much of it driven by anger over the diminishing white majority...and the severe dislocations caused by a still-ailing economy.... [In 2010,] anti-Muslim hate crimes went up by 50%. During the same time frame, a number of religious-right anti-gay groups...have grown extraordinarily vicious in their [anti-gay] propaganda. [S]o-called “Patriot” groups — which, unlike most hate groups, see the federal government as their primary enemy — have grown explosively in just the last three years, going from 149 groups in 2008 to 1,274 last year. As a result of all these developments and others, a new crop of leaders has come to the fore. What follows is an alphabetized series of short profiles of key men and women activists of the radical right — 30 to watch.

Metaxas is not yet a household name, but this has certainly been his year. He was not only the keynote speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast where president Obama also spoke; he also succeeded the late Charles Colson—both as the voice of the nationally-syndicated radio commentary, Breakpoint, and as one of the three-member board of directors of the premier US conservative Catholic/evangelical alliance, The Manhattan Declaration.

As an up and coming evangelical leader, he has also been busy denouncing proposed federal regulations on contraception coverage in employer insurance packages. But he is unique in employing his status as a Bonhoeffer scholar to claim parallels between the regulations and early Nazi-era legislation, as he did, for example, in an appearance on MSNBC.

How can we effectively convey a telling response to common creationist arguments in a 140-character tweet? How can we make our arguments in a public forum without coming across as condescending? Which of our common arguments and critiques are actually most telling with the lay public? How can we address the confirmation bias that seems to occur when people seek sources of information on the internet?

The questions' larger context:

It is no longer necessary to visit an expert at all, even indirectly through his books. Instead, learners can get their information from a wide variety of sources with trivially small amounts of effort and all manner of people have taken advantage of the new technologies to post their pet theories and claims for the world to see. The result is a stupendously huge mass of “information” which has not been tested, vetted or critiqued in any way. To make matters worse, there is evidence that people respond to such diversity by selectively accessing information which confirms their existing opinions (see Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng 2009). The information market is now very clearly a buyer’s market to which the sellers—experts like us—have yet to adapt......[T]raditional methods of presenting science are not always well suited to the world of modern media. It’s my belief that we can win on this new battlefield, but it will require a new strategy for marketing scientific ideas— something the science community typically has not valued highly. What we need to do is spend some time thinking very seriously about how to meet this new challenge with new techniques.

Then, there are other active scientists such as Fabrice Leclerc @leclercfl, who is not only (re-)tweeting science-related findings, but also publishing a regular "online-paper" with evolution-related topics based on Tweets: The evolution daily.

Maria-José Viñas, AGU science writer, also wrote about Twitter and scie

Virginia Athletic Club Changes Family Policy After First Having Banned a Same-sex Couple and Their Son from Family Membership

When Will Trinkle signed up for a family membership at the Roanoke Athletic Club, he was looking forward to bringing his 2-year-old son, Oliver Trinkle-Granados, a family membership. A real-estate agent, he even relocated his office to be closer to the club. He filled out the application in front of a club employee, paid an application fee and handed over his credit card for the monthly dues, and got his membership card and one for Oliver's other dad, Trinkle's partner Juan Granados.

But about a week later, Trinkle was told that his membership had been invalidated. The club had made a big mistake in accepting the application, he says the manager told him, and the club's parent company, Carilion Clinic, did not recognize his household as a family. Furthermore, "Carilion Clinic and RAC were really going to tighten up their procedures and application so that no gay couple would ever get in again on a family membership," the manager allegedly said.

This story ends with some good news: an amendment in policy by the club's parent company, likely at least in part due to Appalachian blogger Mark Lynn Ferguson's petition on Change.org that attracted about 90,000 signatures. Carilion now offers a Household Membership with dues the same as Family Membership. The Trinkle-Granados household will qualify, and Oliver will get to enjoy exercising in the pool after all!

Republicans can move to end gay marriage if they win two more seats in the state Senate this year, a goal that could be within reach. That would give them full control of the statehouse and the power to begin preparing a public referendum [to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage]. But the legislative process would take at least two years, and public interest in the cause is already declining. A Des Moines Register poll in February showed 56 percent of Iowans opposed an amendment banning gay marriage, up slightly from a year earlier. The results tracked with the trend in national opinion on the issue.

"People are getting comfortable with it and that's a shame to tell you the truth," said Susan Geddes, an Iowa Republican and social conservative organizer who worked for Mike Huckabee's 2008 presidential campaign in the state.

Two men, Mark “Major” Jiminez and Beau Chandler, a gay couple in Dallas, Texas walked into the city's County Clerk's office on Thursday determined to do one of two things: get married or get arrested trying.

They were arrested.

According to the Dallas Voice, Jiminez and Chandler entered the County Records Building at about 3 p.m. with friends, TV crews and Dallas police following close behind. “City police, county sheriffs and building security are all here,” Chandler reportedly said. “Nice to get their support.” The couple say they were protesting Texas' ban on gay marriage, passed in 2005, and after being denied by the clerk the marriage license they requested the two handcuffed themselves together at the wrist, sat down on the floor, and waited for police. As the TV cameras rolled, Jiminez explained some of the more than 1,000 rights straight couples enjoy that are denied to gay and lesbian couples. “This is about not being treated equal,” he said.